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February 28, 2007

Pleasant Pheasants: Peacocks Are A Misnomer Most Fowl

Did you know?

A Peacock Is Always Male

Did you know that the term peacock so often used to describe those flashy birds is not the name of the bird species? It's just the special name for the male of the peafowl species. The female is called a peahen and she isn't much to look at compared to her mate.

Posted by sorsha at 5:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Bunny Binkies & Weasel War Dancing

My first pet, like most, was a puppy. His name was Ashes and he would get so excited that he would run like crazy in circles and jump around, crash into things. We all thought it was funny, but it was nothing compared to the wacky behavior we have seen in our pet bunnies.

My husband and I adopted two house rabbits (litterbox trained) when we first got together about a decade ago. Bit and Nibble are quite elderly now (about 12 years old) but when they were younger and got excited, they would do what we called "the happy dance".

The first time we saw Bit do it, we thought something was wrong. She would have these bursts of energy and do these gyrations in mid-air (video). Hop sideways, backwards, off walls. My personal favorite move was when she would jump and land in the opposite direction, and then go still.

Of course at the time, we thought she was having convulsions and that we had done something wrong. Then Nibble started doing it too. At the peak, we had 6 rabbits in the house, and when they were all out together, they would dance over and under each other, leaping and wiggling. It was a sight. I think I have some video of it somewhere. I've since learned that most bunny owners call this behavior binkying.

I recently learned that this happy dancing behavior is not just limited to rabbits. Members of the weasel family, especially pet ferrets, have been known to do something similar, called the Weasel War Dance (video).

While rabbits tend to dance or binky just out of happiness, ferrets seem to do it more as a kind of victory dance. Perhaps thats the difference between prey and predators.

The weasel war dance is a colloquial term for a behavior of excited ferrets. The war dance usually follows play or the successful capture of a toy or a stolen object. It consists of a frenzied series of sideways and backwards hops, often accompanied by an arched back, dooking (chuckling) or hissing noises, and a frizzy tail. Although the weasel war dance may make a ferret appear frightened or angry, they are often just excited and are usually harmless to humans.

More at: Wikipedia: Weasel War Dance

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February 27, 2007

Resourceful Ravens

Legend has it that England will not fall to an invader so long as there are ravens at the Tower of London. The last time I visited the Tower (as a guest, I assure you), the British government-appointed Ravenmaster was doing his utmost to assure that the black-winged birds could never possibly leave. In fact, the six well-fed ravens had been rendered flightless not just by wing trimmings, but by their hearty and frequent meals of liver, eggs and the occasional foolish tourist's finger.

I always thought the legend gruesomely suggested that England was "safe" so long as the Tower served its purpose as a place of execution and torture, thus it would always have ravens around to snack on traitors. If the ravens weren't there, then clearly England wasn't actively protecting its interests. Perhaps, though, King Charles II, who ordered that there should always be six ravens on hand, really wanted them for their keen intelligence.

It's probably pretty clear by now that I am fascinated by animals that are intelligent enough to make and use tools, like chimps as well as other primates and dolphins. I had always thought that macaws were the smartest birds, but many argue that ravens are actually more intelligent. Both macaws and ravens can mimick human speech. In fact, the head crow at the Tower, Thor, frequently greets visitors. Ravens are likely the smartest birds around and recent studies have shown that they also have the largest brains for their size.

Ravens live almost everywhere, from the Sahara to the Arctic Circle. Scavengers by nature, young ravens are inquisitive and playful.

Ravens ... have been recorded playing in the wild. Their antics, photographed in Wales in 1980, involved two birds taking it in turn to slide on their backs down a frozen snow bank. The birds covered about 10ft each time and returned on a second day for more fun and games.

More At: BBC: Smartest Of All Birds

Not Just Sharp, But Highly Flexible

As adults, ravens tend to settle down and mate for life, building long-term nests and then raising chicks together using highly complex mating rituals.

One of the most interesting examples of raven intelligence and specifically tool usage was beautifully illustrated at Oxford recently by a pair of Caledonian Crows named Betty and Abel.

They placed a tiny bucket of meat inside a pipe, and left two pieces of wire in their cage, one hooked and one straight, to see if the birds would choose the hooked wire to retrieve the bucket of meat, proving that birds were "tool users" on a par with higher levels of animal intelligence.

"We were delighted and extremely surprised" reported Alex Kacelnik, one of the bird experts studying the crows, when Abel stole the hooked wire from Betty, and rather than giving up, Betty "modified" the straight wire into a hooked wire, and was thus able to hook the bucket, pull it up, and retrieve her snack. This elevates ravens from "tool users" to "tool makers", which places them on a par with primates.

More At: The Raven.

It also proves, yet again, that women are smarter than men. Here's a video of a raven solving the bottle bait problem, so you can see for yourself.

You Can't Fool A Raven

Scientists believe that ravens are one of the few birds capable of simple math. Most birds will assume that if two people go into a hide and then one comes out, then it is safe to approach the hide because no one is there. Ravens, however, are capable of keeping track of people entering and then exiting and it requires a much greater number of people coming and going (a whole class of school children, for example) to get past the raven's keen eyes.

I'm curious about macaws and counting. If my father-in-law put one treat in one hand, and two in the other, would his macaws choose the one with more treats? Does this count? Heh.

I'd love to see some of the experiments that were done with capuchin monkeys and token values done with ravens. You'd have to decide on tokens carefully, since young ravens do love shiny stuff.

The Clark's Nutcracker, a member of the raven family, also has very impressive spacial memory. During the warm months, it stores up to 100,000 pine seeds (pine nuts?) to eat later. It spreads little caches of about a dozen seeds in each spot, over a large area of up to 150 square miles and yet, even half a year later, the bird can track down the seed caches, even under heavy snow. The nutcracker shows forethought as well, often storing more than it needs to live in order to cover problems like seed-stealing squirrels. This seed spreading also helps maintain the bird's habitat and food source since leftover seeds will germinate in the spring.

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February 26, 2007

San Francisco Shark Smuggling Scandal

Shark finning is a cruel and wasteful practice of catching wild sharks, chopping off their fins (for soup or traditional medicine) and throwing the rest of the shark back in the ocean.

When I hear about finning, I first (and somewhat erroneously) think of foreign fishing vessels. Ones closer to the shark-fin market, primarily Asian. That's not to say I don't think that the Americas aren't doing their own nasty part when it comes to hurting marine wildlife, sharks included. The US plays a significant part in the worldwide overfishing and by-catch dilemmas,and we also import shark fins and shark liver oil. I just assume that we have more regulation of finning.

So hearing about this particularly evil shark smuggling ring operating in my own local area has made me beyond disgusted and not just because the ring-leader says God made him do it. We live in one of the most prized marine ecological areas in the world and yet still people do stupid, terrible things like this, just to make a buck.

Leopard sharks in the San Francisco Bay Area will benefit from fines totaling nearly a million U.S. dollars—money resulting from the bust of a massive shark-smuggling ring that had been operating out of a local church.

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Over the span of more than a decade, the smugglers had pulled thousands of baby leopard sharks from the waters near San Francisco, California. The animals were sold alive to pet stores and private buyers throughout the United States and abroad.

"It's the largest investigation of shark poaching in U.S. history," said Roy Torres, a special agent with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Service's Office of Law Enforcement in Pacific Grove, California.

Last Monday Kevin Thompson—the 48-year-old pastor of the Bay Area Family Church in San Leandro and the poaching ringleader—was sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay a fine of U.S. $100,000.

Five other people were convicted in the two-year investigation and were ordered to pay a combined total of $310,000.

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Following the bust, 19 baby leopard sharks originating from the San Francisco Bay had been delivered to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where the settlement was announced.

Four of the sharks were on display that day. Nine had been returned to the ocean, and the rest had died.

Lisa Nichols, a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in San Diego, California, said that "we estimate anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 sharks have been collected over the last decade."

More At: National Geographic: Shark-Smuggling Bust Nets $1 Million for Habitat Protection

It takes almost a decade for a female leopard shark to reach sexual maturity, which is very slow for a fish species. Yet the smugglers were harvesting pregnant female leopard sharks and cutting their babies out of them. The adult females were too big to ship and sell, so they were discarded while the young ones were sold to pet shops. By targeting females and the young, the smugglers may have had a serious impact on the reproductive capacity of future generations of this harmless shark living in the Bay Area.

Leopard sharks live only the west coast of North America and are already at risk and are protected by numerous laws. The endangered wildlife black market is second only to the illegal drug market in the US.

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February 24, 2007

Ancient Amphibians

Fossilized Frogs.. Ancient Amphibians... Ribbiting Run-in With Resin... Jurassic Jumpers... Well, not really Jurassic period, but the more recent the Paleogene period, which was about 125 million years younger than the Jurassic period.

Regardless, there's been a great discovery of a fully intact tree frog encased in amber. Some people are talking about trying to follow Michael Crichton and extract its DNA, but its unclear whether or not the collector will allow this to happen.

A miner from Mexico's Chiapas state has made the find of a lifetime—a tiny tree frog preserved in amber that could be 25 million years old

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The block of amber, or fossilized tree resin, encasing the 0.4-inch (1-centimeter) frog

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The specimen appears to belong to the genus Craugastor

More At: National Geographic: Ancient Tree Frog Found Encased in Amber

I couldn't find much on Craugastors, other than its a group of frogs from Central America, many of which are critically endangered or extinct. I did find an article that talked about the origin of the Craugastors. The group of Craugastors, which contains over 100 frog species, is monophyletic. This means that the group all had a common ancestor. That ancestor (mommy of of all Craugastor species) looks to have appeared in northern Central America from South American in the early Paleocene epoch, which was about 56-66 million years ago.

Half the time I was finding that Craugastor was a subgenus and then a genus. What appears to have happened is that these frogs were originally lumped into a larger genus called Eleutherodactylus, but once the common ancestor was found, the Craugastor group was extracted from this larger genus and elevated to its own genus.

Still, taxonomy is slippery stuff, scientists do not always agree on how to classify organisms. The original methods involved only what could be observed. Then came DNA and other more intimate methods of determining how species have evolved.

Here's an example of what I mean... some groups like Craugastor are formed (or re-formed) because genetics supports their cohesiveness as a group at the genus level. However there is another genus that seems to have split from Eleutherodactylus but the primary reason for the grouping is all frogs in the group supposedly lack vomerine teeth. Now here we have a physical characteristic for classification that does not necessarily make for a cohesive group from a genetic perspective. We might infer that this group is going to be closer (family-tree wise) to other reptiles and amphibians that do not have vomerine teeth, like geckos. Still, this is just a visual observation and it is possible that the species both evolved seperately to not have the teeth or to have the teeth, as it may be.

Still don't see why physical characteristics might not be the best way to indicate closely related animals? Let's assume that someone decided to put all green lizards together as evolutionarily similar, assuming that their color was their primary distinguishing trait for grouping. Unless other factors are considered, a green lizard on the other side of the world or in a very remote location would likely be put in the same group, even though it might be very hard to see how they could possibly come from a shared ancestor from so far away. Now consider that perhaps the actual distinguishing trait on these groups of lizards is that a set of closely related lizards learned to blend in with their surroundings, not just be green. You might find that a lizard living in a green environment and another living in an orange, rocky environment just down the way are more closely related evolutionarily than the group of green lizards.

Posted by sorsha at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 23, 2007

Senegal Chimps Spear Their Suppers

I thought about calling this the Bushbaby Barbeque, but since the chimpanzees are spearing the little wide-eyed primates, not roasting them, it didn't seem quite right. Yet.

Yes, you heard me right. Another example of tool usage has cropped up in primates, but this time they aren't bashing nuts open with rocks, or sucking termites out of their mounds with hollow reeds. This time, they've taken things a step further, honing their tools to make more efficient hunting weapons.

The chimps are sharpening sticks with their teeth and then jabbing the homemade spears into the dens of bushbabies, which they then eat. I personally didn't know that chimps ate bushbabies in the first place, so that was news to me as well.

Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other animals, according to a study in the journal Current Biology. It's the first time primates have been seen using tools to hunt.

The first time, huh? You know, it really bugs me when articles say stuff like "Primates and Humans" or "the first time primates have..." You know why? Because humans are primates. Not only do we share the same order (Primate), we are also in the same suborder (Haplorrhini), infraorder (Simiiformes), parvorder (Catarrhini), superfamily (Hominoidea), family (Hominidae) and subfamily (Homininae) as gorillas and chimpanzees. We can even go down to the tribe (Hominini) if we drop the gorillas and only include the chimps. But no, we have to keep ourselves separate. Superior.

Chimps have been known to use tools before... but this use of spear-like weapons to attack other animals is completely new.

More At: BBC News: Chimps use spears to hunt and BBC News: Chimpanzees 'hunt using spears'

New, to us. This does not necessarily mean that the chimps haven't been doing this for a while without us noticing. Much of our research in the past has been done in artificial surroundings. In zoos with captive animals. Certainly there have not been a lot of long term studies in their natural environment and I think that the technologies enabling people to spend more time in natural habitats may have something to do with a lot of these new findings. This is why people like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey have made such an impact on primatology (the study of all primates except humans) and ethology (animal behavior) in the past. Dian Fossey was known for her scorn of the research students she would get for a couple weeks who would then go back to civilization and often never do field work again.

Wikipedia had some more information, including the fact that only about 1 out of 22 of the bush baby "spear-hunts" were successful. This makes me wonder if this is a more recent change in behavior. If you had a 4.5% chance of catching dinner, would you eventually resort to older, tried and true methods? Or is this statistically an improvement on catch rates and so the behavior will reenforce itself?

Posted by sorsha at 4:26 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 22, 2007

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Barracuda?

In Kenya, we had a rather large crocodile take up residence outside our tent. When we asked a local how to avoid a confrontation, he said:

Don't act like an impala.

In Hawaii this past week, a tourist asked how to avoid a shark attack and received the following response:

Don't look like a seal.

This is actually very good advice. Most animal attacks, even by apex predators, are either due to either harassment or misinterpretation. Nowadays most people know that from below, surfers look a lot like seals. A person kneeling at a water hole could be mistaken for a small animal drinking. The glint of a dive knife can look a lot like fish scales.

There's a reason people say "Look big" and then back down when you come in contact with a predator. If we aren't paying attention, we might accidently act like prey, cowering or running without thinking. In almost all cases though, its best to stand your ground and then remove yourself from the situation. Having something in front of you to act as a shield helps too, whether its a backpack or a dive light.

Nowadays I live on the West Coast, where my main concern when diving is that a California Sea Otter will chew through my air hose, but when I was young and lived on the East Coast, many of my friends would go to Florida for vacations. They didn't worry about the sharks (a few thousand fatalities in the past century) or jellies (the box jellyfish kills more people than sharks, crocodiles and stonefish combined), or Portuguese Man-of-War. They worried about the barracudas.

Barracudas are an interesting group of fish with a chilling reputation that is quite undeserved. They've gotten a bad wrap for what is mostly just a face only a mother could love (incidentally, she doesn't even see her young cause they are fertilized in open water and grow up alone in estuaries). Apparently, only two fatalities can be attributed to barracuda in the past century.

On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year (choking only, other ballpoint pen related deaths have been omitted from this statistic). The first patent on a ballpoint pen was issued in 1888, but let's say they weren't mass produced until the 1940's after some significant improvements. Number crunch sound here. Ok, so by my math, that means you are 3500x more likely to choke on a ballpoint pen than you are to be killed by a barracuda.

Barracudas are scavengers and they are not particularly stupid. They may appear to be stalking you, but likely they think you're a bigger predator likely to find them some food. They're hanging out to snag your leftovers. Wait, that didn't sound right...

Perhaps I should have called this post Mimicking A Meal Will Get You Munched... the point is that just about all animals, even apex predators, do not enjoy eating manflesh. The only creatures I know that do are the fictional orcs in Lord of the Rings. The rest of the critters of the world will spit you out.

Posted by sorsha at 4:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dedicated To Dirt: State Soils

I ran across a reference to Hawaii having a state soil called Hilo and I was like,"Huh?"

My next thought was, "Is this a farmer thing?". Clearly geologists weren't satisfied with State Gem, State Rock, State Mineral, State Fossil, and State Prehistoric Artifact. We all needed a State Soil. Too bad these soils aren't given protection like state animals and flowers.

But soil? How can someone really get excited over a state soil?

I was intruged, so I looked them up.

Just like we have a stratosphere, we also have a pedosphere (as in foot, or to step on, as best my one year of high school Latin recalls). The Pedosphere is the outermost layer of the Earth's crust where soil hangs out. It's bordered by a lot of stuff: the lithosphere (bedrock beneath the Earth's crust), atmosphere (air above us), hydrosphere (water around us) and biosphere (the relatively small skin of the Earth where life exists).

I know soil by basically two names: topsoil and dirt. It turns out, soils have many names... alluring names like Oklahoma Port and Ohio Miamian and Vermont Tunbridge. The state soil is generally named after the place where it was first got attention.

Soils have all sorts of characteristics from color (red dirt, black silt, loamy greenish brown) to texture to drainage to its chemical composition (clay, iron). Soils are also layered - like much more specifically than topsoil and "the rest of the stuff underneath":

On Top: Surface Horizon or Topsoil- Where new organic materials (humus) decay.

In The Middle: Subsoil - Where the minerals and stuff from the surface accumulate with some rocks.

Down Below: Soil Substratum - Mostly worn but large rocks here, eventually become part of the soil.

Rock Bottom: Solid, hard bedrock which doesn't interact with soil because its buffered by the soil substratum.

Here's a great website by the US Dept of Agriculture that covers the State Soils, with write-ups on each soil profile, complete with soil pictures and characteristics along with a map of where you can go check the soil out in each state.

Posted by sorsha at 3:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Invasive Armies Are A Pestiferous Problem

Hawaii seems to have a history of being colonized... by invasive species.

When I was young, I used to value the lives of all animals equally. On rainy days, when I was walking home from the bus stop, I would pick worms out of puddles and deposit them on safe ground. I would let an ant crawl onto my finger and deposit it out of harms way. Those were teh days...Then I went off to college, and while living in the dorms my attitude towards my little six legged friends, the ants, changed considerably.

Our apartment had a full kitchen and we lived on the top floor. The people who lived below us had less than desirably cleanliness. At first, it was just the occassional scout ant. We'd pick them up and take them out on the back porch and release them. Then one day, we came home ad our entire carpet was covered with them. Nothing was safe, anything remotely scented was crawling with the little buggers. From then on, the gloves were off. It was four young women against an army of ants and we vowed to win, even if it meant killing them one at a time.

Long story short, we first tried to be eco-friendly, and even ant friendly. We encouraged them to leave by removing all food sources. We had to keep ALL our food (cereal, bread, spices) in the fridge for safe-keeping for more than a semester but it made no difference with the idiots living below us. Finally, we had to resort to more stringent methods of ant eradication.

After one especially bad evening in which we all, more or less, ate ants, we decided to show no more mercy. After all, they hadn't. They had even foudn their way into our refrigerator. All chemical eradication methods (we found the uni-supplied glass cleaner worked better than most stuff) were used in the battle, stomping for good measure. Despite the exterminators and all manner of ant-proofing chemicals and home remedies, the problem never did go away entirely. We finally just moved off-campus. By the end of that year, each and every one of us, kindly souls that we were, showed not an ounce of regret for squishing an ant with a thumb (and generally did so with some relish). Smushing them was not nearly as disgusting as ingesting them, after all.

Still, it's good to remember that ants generally serve a very useful purpose. They aerate the soil and eat other creepy crawlies, as well as acting as a food source for other animals, including humans (ant eating is a delicacy). We've also been able to axploit the amazing working power of ants in our agricultural processes. For example, the wonderful African red tea, Rooibos, is cultivated using ants. The seeds of the Rooibos (red bush) plant are very, very small. Like grain of sand small. So instead of having laborers try to collect them, farmers employ ants that collect the seeds and return them to their colonies, where they are harvested.

According to Wikipedia, ants make up almost a quarter of the Earth's animal biomass and there are not many ant-free places left in the world, just perpetually cold remote places like Antarctica. One place that doesn't have native ants is the Hawaiian Islands. It was just remote enough not to have them show up on their own.

Not until people showed up, anyway. One especially destructive ant species, the Argentine ant, arrived in Honolulu on goods shipped from California during the Great Depression after causing quite a bit of citrus crop damage on the mainland. This ant tends to chase other ants out and preys on pest-eating and pollenating insects (the kind farmers like) as well as on the crops and seeds themselves.

Nowadays almost four dozen ant species have moved in on the Hawaiian Islands and are causing significant troubles with the local wildlife. Because the islands are so remote, the native plants and animals have evolved differently from much of the rest of the world. There are virtually no social insects native to the islands, and so the strengths of the complex social hierarchy of ant colonies often overwhelm the native locals.

The native insect population that has long acted as the pollinators for the native flora, and has not developed adaptations to avoid being eaten by ants (like tasting bad or flying or having hard exo-skeletons) and so the ants munch away undeterred on them and on the native plants and plant seeds as well.

The Argentine ant has a long history of causing trouble when it is introduced into new ecosystems. Because it is able to survive and thrive at high elevations, the Argentine ant is one of the few ant species that can climb up into the fragile volcano ecosystems, such as Haleakala National Park on Maui. Scientists are finding that the ant colonies established here are having a negative impact on the local insects, arthropods especially. The Argentine loves to eat young bees so you can see out that might negatively impact pollenators throughout the world. This disrupts the whole food chain, causing indirect effects on more native fauna that relies on these native bugs and plants for its food and other uses like nesting materials for animals like the endangered Palila, a large Hawaiian honeycreeper.

On Maui this past week, we saw very few birds but we saw quite a lot of ants and a couple mongooses. It's become apparent that the native bird populations are being attacked from a variety of angles, but almost all problems can be attributed to invasive species - whether its humans stealing their habitat, troubles of mongoose eating their eggs, or ants disrupting their food sources.

Posted by sorsha at 1:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 21, 2007

Macaws On Maui?

We've been in Maui, Hawaii this past week, so I figured we'd share a bit from our travels. So, Picture This...

We are enjoying our dinner in a window table overlooking the beautiful beach at sunset. We've literally de-planed and gone straight to our favorite restaurant on Maui, Mama's Fish House. Ok, so we were a tad early so we went wine tasting up at the Tedeschi Vineyards at 'Ulupalakua Ranch beforehand… but that's another story. We are contentedly sipping our Iwilei Refresher and the Hookipa Sunset when a noise shatters the laidback atmosphere.

SQUAAAAWWWWWKKK!

That noise sounds familiar.... but we can't see its source. Surely it cannot be a...

Our dinner arrives. As we savor our excellent meal of the best Pua Me Hua Hana on the island (Old Hawaii Ono and Mahimahi sautéed in coconut milk, with slow-cooked Kalua pig, Grilled banana,  Molokai sweet potato, poi, Island fruit and a fresh coconut) as well as the Crispy Kalua Duck (with mango-mui glaze, baby bok choy and lemongrass rice pilaf), we hear it again.

The unmistakable screech of a macaw, the largest of parrots. A few seconds later, a blue and gold sails down from above us and lands on a nearby palm frond. My father-in-law raises breeding macaws, but never have we seen one fly unencumbered before. No clipped wings here. It's quite a sight and we are intrigued.

Despite what most people would think (ooh pretty colorful bird, must be Hawaiian)… Macaws are not native to Hawaii but from the rainforests of Central and South America. By dessert (Banana Macadamia Nut Crisp, served warm with Tahitian vanilla ice cream, in case you cared), we have discovered from the restaurant staff that this particular macaw is a former pet set free. The blue and gold is fed by the nearby locals and so the bird sticks around. When my husband approaches, the macaw looks almost willing to jump down onto his arm, given the proper incentive.

Most species of macaws are endangered, mostly because their rainforest habitat is disappearing at alarming rates, but also due to capture of wild ones for the pet trade. A healthy blue and gold macaw can go for several thousand dollars in the US, and macaw feathers are often used in Native American tribal ceremonies.

The larger species of macaws like this blue and gold (Ara ararauna) have very long lives — often upwards of 75 years. Many people buy young hatchlings as pets only to find that a young macaw, if well cared for, is likely to outlive not only them, but their children as well. Unwanted pets are often released into the wild. Lucky for this blue and gold macaw, the Hawaiian Islands offer a similar habitat to what they require — including abundant fruit and nuts.

This particular bird looks very healthy and happy here, despite being non-native. It's charming personality, keen intelligence and brilliant plumage likely keep it from being harassed.

But while this macaw is unlikely to cause much trouble as a herbivore and a single individual, other non-native species have caused massive damage to the fragile island ecosystem. The mongoose is a prime example of a destructive invasive species.

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Check out our Maui, Hawaii podcast - a video program that highlights this beautiful place!

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February 15, 2007

Año Nuevo: Scavengers

Coyote

February is a crucial time for baby elephant seals.

Many of them are about 28 days old, and suddenly, their mothers up and leave them, hopefully high and dry.

They don't know how to swim. They have nothing to eat. They're plump as can be, those little seals we call weaners.

They face predators both on land and in the sea. Great white sharks and orcas patrol the waters off the point and on land, scavengers like this coyote pick off the weak and defenseless.

The weaners gather together in little groups called weaner pods, huddling for protection, shelter and companionship. They play in the rain puddles and blow bubbles in the water as they teach themselves to swim, by instinct alone.

The big male elephant seals are the beachmasters, but the coyotes are the beach cleaners. Sometimes little seals don't make it, and the coyotes are there to take care of it.

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February 9, 2007

Ozone In The Low Zone

In light of the carbon challenge put forth by Sir Richard Branson, I started thinking about what are some of the greenhouse gasses we have to deal with nowadays. I decided to go back to the ozone layer problem and look at UV rays and global warming and I learned some things about ozone I hadn't known before...

They've Penetrated Our Shields: Ozone Holes

The ozone holes are located in the stratosphere, the second layer of Earth's atmosphere from the inside. It is situated between about 10 km-50 km above the Earth's surface, but only about 8 km from the surface at the poles. If you're thinking of building some sort of air filter to reach the stratosphere, then build it on one of the poles.In comparison, the main Trans-Alaska Pipeline runs 1,300 km from the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to the Gulf of Alaska at Valdez, Alaska. Planes routinely fly in the stratosphere.

Holes: A How To

The destruction of our nice layers of atmosphere has been attributed, at least in part, to chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's) and halons. It takes about five years for CFCs to get up to the stratosphere. Once they reach the upper ozone layer, they are no longer so protected from UVB rays from the sun. The UVB breaks down the CFC's, resulting in lots of free chlorine atoms. A single Cl atom in the stratosphere can destroy many thousands of ozone molecules.

We have too many CFCs in the stratosphere and not enough ozone. So we want to make more ozone, right? Wrong!

Good Up High - Bad Nearby

Lower in the atmosphere, like in the troposphere and on the Earth's surface, ozone is considered a bad greenhouse gas. And we have a lot of it.

According to the U.S. EPA, "10 to 20 percent of all summertime respiratory-related hospital visits in the northeastern U.S. are associated with [ground-level] ozone pollution".

Ground-level ozone is at its highest concentration in summer, so if we're going to do something drastic about ground level ozone, it makes sense to target summers as the most vital time.

We've limited CFC's, so how are we making ozone?

More sunlight (UVB radiation specifically) passes through the stratosphere, now that it has holes in it. This same UVB then interacts with the gases, both man-made and natural, which exist closer to the Earth's surface. The pollutants we emit from cars and factories react, creating harmful levels of ozone down low where we can breathe them.

We also generate ozone directly by our usage of high voltage electrical equipment like ionic air purifiers, laser printers and photocopiers. Due to its highly reactive state, ozone has been used extensively for water purification and high concentrations in the air can help decontaminate places from certain chemical or biological contaminants or odors.

However, it's nice to know that no ozone is generated when the HP LaserJet series printer is in standby mode, so you can leave it on if you need to, but printing less will limit the emissions and save trees, too.

Look Lower: Problems below the Stratosphere

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted as gases from certain solids or liquids. There are both natural and man-made contributors to the levels of volatile organic compounds in the air we breathe. Man-made culprits include fuels, paints, solvents and glues, cleaners, pesticides, building materials, and machines like such as copiers and printers. Even permanent markers emit these harmful fumes. Basically, if you can sniff it, its likely a VOC. These noxious gases and fumes interact with the UV sunlight coming into the atmophere and generate even more ozone.

Nature Fumes

Volatile organic compounds aren't just produced by nasty manmade agents. In fact, trees are a significant producer - they emit isoprene and monoterpenes that react with nitrogen oxides (like smog) to form ozone.

There have been studies to determine which trees and shrubs produce minimal VOCs. There is even a Cal Poly project called SelecTree that helps people select tree and shrub species to plant based on their "features" including biogenic emission levels, fire resistance, and whether or not they are wildlife friendly. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that sniffy trees like Eucalyptus top the list of VOC producers...

Posted by sorsha at 7:36 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Cash for Climate Change Cessation Concepts

Forget grant money, scientists now have some monetary incentives to help solve the problem of how to manage the massive amounts of carbon emissions we humans spew into the atmosphere every year. Now, a rich Brit has thrown down the greenhouse gas gauntlet in hopes of helping encourage research towards solutions to the climate conundrum facing the world today

British tycoon Sir Richard Branson on Friday announced a $25 million prize for a way to extract a billion tons or more of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.

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The winner will have to come up with a way of removing one billion tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years — with $5 million of the prize being paid at the start and the remaining $20 million at the end.

More At: MSNBC: $25 million climate prize offered by Branson

According to Wikipedia, the major culprits of the man-made greenhouse gases breakdown as follows: 72% carbon dioxide, 18% methane, 9% nitrous oxide and 1% other gases. So it makes sense that the challenge targets the carbon dioxide - its the largest problem, and so it should have the biggest "bang" for the buck, if you will.

The carbon dioxide comes from a wide variety of sources — construction and power stations being some of worst. Your average 1000 megawatt coal-fired power station produces around 6 million tons of CO2 per year. The methane and nitrous oxides are primarily due to ag byproducts, fossil fuel processing, waste treatment and disposal, and land use and biomass burning. You can see more of the greenhouse gas breakdown here.

Sinks: Carbon Down The Drain

According to the contest, though, it appears they're looking for ideas for extracting some of the existing high levels of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Carbon sinks are natural or artificial ways of absorbing or removing carbon from the atmosphere. The natural methods involve oceans, forests, and soil. Other ways include pumping the carbon dioxide into naturally occurring underground storage areas.

Ocean Sinks

It's a very good thing that oceans cover 71% of our Earth's surface, because it makes up the largest active carbon sink on the planet. Currently, about a third of manmade emissions are entering the oceans.

Most of the carbon dioxide dissolves, but large growths or blooms of plankton also consume additional quantities. These tiny plants consume significant quantities of CO2 via photosynthesis. Adding plankton-friendly plant food, in the form of iron, may encourage more plankton to grow. According to Wikipedia, a test in 2002 in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica suggests that between 10,000 and 100,000 carbon atoms are sunk for each iron atom added to the water.

Forcefully injecting large quantities CO2 into the oceans to neutralize it might work. The solubility of carbon dioxide is a higher in colder seawater. However, while most CO2 would dissolve, it could react with the water to form carbonic acid which could have disastrous environmental effects.

Forest Sinks

Forests are the most well known consumers of carbon dioxide - photosynthesis not only takes CO2 from the air, but produces the oxygen we breathe. Even better, young and growing forests act as more efficient sinks compared to mature forests and bogs, whose natural rotting materials may produce some carbon dioxide. Keeping forests growing larger and more dense is a good way to keep forests consuming more CO2 than they produce.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (of the Dept of Energy), building materials and operations (the energy required to operate residential, commercial, and industrial buildings plus to create building materials like carpet, tile, glass, and concrete) make up more than half of man-made CO2 emissions.

Topsoil

Topsoil has the highest concentration of organic carbon matter in the Earth's soil, so it makes sense that this is where most plant root systems suck their nutrients from.

The organic matter (humus) in soil has more carbon than that in vegetation and the atmosphere combined. Humus accumulates below about 25 degrees centigrade, otherwise it will be oxidized. Warm climates like the tropics have very thin soils, whereas places like the grasslands contribute humus mostly with their complex root systems, where organic carbon can remain stable for a long time under the ground. Grassland ecosystems are very much under threat. As we convert these regions to farm and ranchlands, we turn up massive root systems. The carbonic organic matter quickly oxidizes and enters the atmosphere.

What about Containment?

So what to do with the billion tons of excess carbon dioxide we suck out of the atmosphere each year?

One promising technique is geo-storage or storing the gas directly in the earth. We don't even have to excavate because we can use existing structures like oil fields and coal seams. In fact, for the past three decades, oil companies have been injecting CO2 into dwindling oil fields to improve the recovery of oil. The oil recovered by these efforts helps to offset the costs of pumping the CO2 in. An oilfield in Saskatchewan is currently conducting a project in CO2 containment and a natural gas platform in the North Sea has been skimming the carbon dioxide out of the gas and storing it geologically, supposedly reducing their CO2 emissions by almost a million tones a year with relatively low operating costs. Coal seams are also a potential storage facility because the carbon dioxide gets absorbed into the coal and produces methane. The proceeds from the methane could also be used to help support this containment system.

To support the containment of carbon within the soil, we need to encourage farming and ranching methods than enhance the carbon within the soil instead of release it. Many of these practices are being used more widely in organic farming. For example, only 5% of farming in the United States uses no-till and residue mulching. Grazing management to preserve grasslands, conversion of farmland to ranchland and crop rotation are also carbon-friendly practices.

Rethinking Our Disposable Nature

We love to dispose of things rather than fix them. We like everything to be new, new, new! One way to contain carbon generated by forests is to recycle wood (and other products that require carbon emissions to create) instead of discarding them. Burning carbon-rich wood returns its carbon to the air — a ton of dry wood equates to about 1.8 tons of CO2. So by this math, 555,555,556 dry tons of high quality wood recycling would offset about a billion tons of CO2.

How Many Houses?

Ok, so this is way oversimplified, but how many houses make 555,555,556 dry tons?

Well, the first thing we need to know is how much does a house weigh, if we assume that all the weight could be made from recycled materials instead of new building material?

According to the Seattle Times, a typical house weighs about 155,000 pounds. So by our math, we need about…3585 houses worth of material recycled — that's about the same size as the town of Norwich, Vermont. Also, if we were to include the concrete foundation, then we only need half that many (about the size of Vinalhaven, a little town on an island off the coast of Maine).

Posted by sorsha at 4:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack